The Limit

ROSALIND BELBEN was born in 1941 and spent her early childhood in rural Dorset, in the southwest of England. From the age of nine she was at boarding school on the edge of Dartmoor, in Devon. Almost straight from school she went in 1959 to work for the next two years in theater, meaning to become a writer of stage plays. That didn’t happen. Her subsequent life has been nomadic, her experience and employment varied—with sometimes, nevertheless, years on end passed in a single place.

The countryside of Dorset has been both inspiration and recurrent setting. Quite as much, abroad has exerted a powerful draw. There have been many adored destinations. Südtirol or the Alto Adige, the German-speaking Alpine region in the north of Italy, from 1978—or in the 1990s Tunisia, with its myriad Roman and Phoenician remains and Islamic culture. Many epiphanies.

In 1987 Belben was in West Berlin as a Fellow of the Artist in Residence Program, staying for fifteen months. Her novel Our Horses in Egypt was awarded the 2007 James Tait Black Prize for fiction. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

PAUL GRIFFITHS is the author of many books about Western classical music, and has written music criticism for The Times (London), The New Yorker, The New York Times, and other periodicals. Among his novels are Myself and Marco Polo, The Lay of Sir Tristram, and Mr. Beethoven, which is available from New York Review Books.

THE LIMIT

ROSALIND BELBEN

Introduction by

PAUL GRIFFITHS

NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

New York

THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

207 East 32nd Street, New York, NY 10016

www.nyrb.com

Copyright © 1974 by Rosalind Belben

Introduction copyright © 2023 by Paul Griffiths

All rights reserved.

First published as a New York Review Books Classic in 2023.

Cover image: Rembrandt van Rijn, Sick Woman (maybe Saskia, wife of the painter), c. 1640, Musée de la Ville de Paris, Musée du Petit-Palais, France/Bridgeman Images

Cover design: Katy Homans

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Belben, Rosalind, 1941– author. | Griffiths, Paul, 1947 November 24– writer of introduction.

Title: The limit / by Rosalind Belben ; introduction by Paul Griffiths.

Description: New York : New York Review Books, 2023. | Series: New York Review Books Classics

Identifiers: LCCN 2023012386 (print) | LCCN 2023012387 (ebook) | ISBN 9781681377520 (paperback) | ISBN 9781681377537 (ebook)

Subjects: LCGFT: Novels.

Classification: LCC PR6052.E36 L5 2023 (print) | LCC PR6052.E36 (ebook) | DDC 823/.9/14—dc23/eng/20230316

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023012386

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023012387

ISBN 978-1-68137-753-7

v1.0

For a complete list of titles, visit www.nyrb.com

CONTENTS

Cover

Biographical Notes

Title Page

Copyright and More Information

Introduction

THE LIMIT

Dedication

Note

Epigraph

The Passage of a Soul at Death Into Another Body 1

The Carrying of a Person to Another Place or Sphere of Existence 1

A Cause or Occasion of Keen Distress or Sorrow 1

The Carrying of a Person to Another Place or Sphere of Existence 2

A Change Brought About by the Sea 1

The State of Time of Being a Child 1

Time That is to Be or Come Hereafter 1

A Cause or Occasion of Keen Distress or Sorrow 2

The Carrying of a Person to Another Place or Sphere of Existence 3

Time That is to Be or Come Hereafter 2

The State of Time of Being a Child 2

A Change Brought About by the Sea 2

A Cause or Occasion of Keen Distress or Sorrow 3

A Change Brought About by the Sea 3

The Passage of a Soul at Death Into Another Body 2

The State of Time of Being a Child 3

The Carrying of a Person to Another Place or Sphere of Existence 4

Time That is to Be or Come Hereafter 3

The Passage of a Soul at Death Into Another Body 3

INTRODUCTION

THE LIMIT came out in 1974 as Rosalind Belben’s third book, keeping up her annual rate of production but suddenly very different. Bogies, in 1972, was a pair of stories dissimilar in form—one almost entirely in dialogue, the other a more regular narrative—but alike in presenting a lone female character beset. Reuben, little hero, the following year, had some of the qualities of both—close observation; short, broken sentences sometimes—in the context of a family story that hinged on a couple’s sole child.

Difference in The Limit is manifold. The syntax is everywhere abrupt. Narrative time is at once stopped—at a moment, which would stand for many, when a man is sitting in the hospital room of his conspicuously older, dying wife—and exploded by scenes from both past and future. The central situation precludes dialogue to open space for interior worlds calling out to one another. Points of view (his, hers, third person) and tenses (present, past) are at once distinct and compacted. Realism is shot through with trope. The novel should fall apart; instead it falls—hurtles—together, with a clang of rightness and necessity.

Living in London from 1972 to 1978, Belben had friends who were also giving the English novel a shake, especially Giles Gordon, who became her agent as well as colleague. Dinner parties at the home he shared with his wife, Margaret, a children’s book illustrator, introduced Belben to other writers. Further acquaintance in the literary world came through the publishers of The Limit and its predecessors, Hutchinson, for whom she read manuscripts, visiting the office weekly. Among the writers she met there was the poet-novelist Elaine Feinstein.

There was, therefore, a context for The Limit, but no parallel. In language and form, Belben’s writing was like no other, and remains startling half a century later. The subject of the book is as old as the troubadours: the love unto death, and beyond death. But the shape that subject takes here is not pretty. Nor is it easy. Quite apart from their savage difference in age and physical condition, Anna and Ilario are separated by background and culture. She is English, from the landed gentry, he Italian, a man of the sea. Land and sea, virginity and sensuality, middle age and youth, blank white and smooth olive: these are the oppositions they—or the force of love in them—must overcome, and then time adds another, that of physical decline and robust good health, and that too is surmounted.

For this to happen, as we read, requires a driving energy in the writing—an energy that will stop at nothing, whether in charging through the norms of syntax or refusing politeness. The sympathetic reader will find the former exhilarating: a radical alterity demanded by the urgency of the storytelling.

An example. She is perpetually worried: about green vegetables. Without that colon, the sentence would take us directly to the banal object of Anna’s anxiety. With it, we are forced to stop a little, so that the perpetual worry will circle in our own minds, and the revelation of the worry’s cause then have touches of humor and relief as well as bathos.

Another example. His attention moved. Above his head, above the medicine cupboard. Perched a white enamel can. Here the irregular punctuation brings us close to a character (Ilario this time), not in confusion but in perception. Ilario’s eyes jerk. The jerk is there in the separation of adverbial phrases from their verb.

As for the novel’s frankness, some readers will need to be prepared for occasional unflinching encounters with bodily dysfunction or the insensitivity to animal suffering that is one aspect of English rural culture—alongside deep sympathy for dogs and horses, displayed in almost all Belben’s fiction. More jarring now than it was when the novel was first published, the term wop, derogatory slang for